On Data Loss

2025-12-05

I lost data the other day. I’m pretty bummed out about it. I lost all my entire ‘Documents’ folder. Here’s the worst part… I truly in my heart of hearts don’t know how it happened. It’s one thing to make a mistake, hell I make them ALL the time. But it’s another to have something bad happen, play it back in your head and not know WHY it happened.

I like to pride myself on having a pretty spotless data loss record. For the last maybe 15 years or a little more I have NEVER lost files. Hellova record.

I am a firm beleiver in the 3-2-1 backup method, it’s well known and well respected, near everyone I have looked up to over the years has used some variant of this method, the gist of which is summed up as ‘3 copies of your data, 2 different types of media (say HDD and cloud) and 1 copy stored elsewhere’ the idea being that if your house burned down tomorrow, you would still have everything you need stored in some other location.

I have thrown away data over the years but I’m talking linux iso’s burned to disks that I no longer needed, things like that, infact this was probably 7 years ago that I chucked them as my laptop at the time (and everyone since) hasn’t had a CD/DVD drive in it yay technology(?)

This stung though, I had roughly 46Gb of data in my Documents folder, I initially thought it was 35GB but realised I had a ‘data management’ day and moved my old blog archives and old posts in there as well.

So OFFICIALLY speaking, this blog and its post’s are the entirety of the words, stories, knowledge and teaching I have written over the years.

My stomach still hurts just thinking about it.

I actually figured it out, the loss included;

• Blog posts
• CTF notes/cheatsheets
• Fully written CTF writeups ready to be released daily for about 4 months (I wrote A LOT)
• Personal documents
• CVs I have made over the years (always have your CV up to date) - Downloaded a backup
• Medical Documents
• Books - Legal ones not torrented stuff
• Business Ideas/Notes/Paperwork/Intellectual Property
• Archives of my old Google Account/Drive
• a BIG folder of stuff to be sorted
• Applications I have developed
• A Journal
• Mods for games I have played over the years
• My ENTIRE PEN200.rar download from Offsec (all the training material for my OSCP attampt) - F**K!!

And I think that about covers it…

Honestly it hurts and I don’t think I’ll get over it anytime soon BUT it is nice to get it off my chest (so to speak).

It was my error, I guess, I just don’t know how it happened.

Of the things I can speak about… I was between backup solutions, moving stuff from one provider to another in a futureproofing effort, I was trying to make my life easier going forwards but as it turns out, you copy this, move that and try to put it back (or something) and somehow you have an empty folder copy over the full one and poof it’s gone.

Lé Sigh..

For the nerds reading this, yes I too am a nerd.

Infact I am the Cheif ‘Household IT Guru’ for our house, and I did try some data recovery solutions.

For people unfamiliar with the deletion process, when you delete an item on your computer is isn’t actually gone what happens is the link to the item you see in your documents folder or desktop is simply removed, so you no longer ‘see’ the file and it goes to the recycle bin.

The same thing happens when you empty the recycle bin (to a degree based on overall file size) the link to that file is removed, not the file itself which sits ‘unmapped’ somewhere on your hard drive, so nothing can ‘find’ it.

As the IT Guru I tried several free and probably malware laiden solutions from websites some would consider ‘highly sketchy’. Of the softwares used only 2 had some success finding some of the files and of the two one got the file names and sizes correct, the other recovered some .txt files but they were filled with unintelligble garbage… lost and shredded it seems.

Again, this hurts, I’m still wating for Offsec to come back to me on what can be done about my super old training material from 2021 before everything changed and still included the Buffer Overflow stuff - Damn Offsec sure has changed over the years, did you know they now give you creds for the Active Directory set (well low priv and you have to figure out the rest).

Moving forward

Well it’s not all doom and gloom, Im happy that I have been able to ‘find’ some of the things I am missing, Humble Bundle keeps copies of your purchased content so ‘hello’ 1/5th of the books I used to have.

My backup and recovery method works for everything but my documents folder apparently (I laugh about it now but know there are some tears at the corners of my eyes).

I don’t see something like this ever happening again but I will be double checking files and sizes before anything and hopefully in the future be getting a little NAS set up for me and the family, you would be suprised what kinds of ‘fun things’ you can find on eBay cheap enough.

I don’t think it’s likely but if any cool storage providers out there want to reach out and sponsor the ‘Ha3ks HomeLab’ I am completely open, email me! 😂

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I don’t have any sponsors or anything but if you enjoy my work, or feel sympathy for my wife, then I have set up a Ko-Fi account as well as a BuyMeACoffee people can donate to.